SHARK ATTACK

in the Americas, cal AD 789-1033

There are no eyewitness accounts,
only the testimony of the bones. Yet our knowledge of prehistoric lifeways
and forensic anthropology allow us to reconstruct what probably happened.
The incident went something like this:

Their village was on
the north coast of Puerto Rico near the modern town of Vega Baja. The
two fishermen left the village as the sun was rising in the east. They
pushed their small dugout canoe into the gentle surf and began paddling
toward the azure reef line about 500 meters from shore. Small whitecaps
broke on the reef marking their destination. They were probably using
hook and line, spears, or a net; or possibly all three depending on
the conditions that day and the fish they were encountering. Their prey
was the groupers, snappers, parrotfishes, and grunts that live in close
association with the reef. Then suddenly, their world was turned upside
down.

There was no soundtrack
music to raise the alarm, just the gentle lapping of waves on the side
of the canoe as it bobbed gently in the light chop generated by the
shallow reef. It was likely a beautiful morning. High cumulous clouds
in a robin's egg blue sky with golden rays of sunlight projected by
the dawn. Peace and beauty, and perhaps a bountiful catch.

They had hooked and
likely speared several fish, which they discussed in animated voices.
The thrill of the hunt, and the joy of success. There were sharp pulls
on the cotton handline. The fisherman reached with his right arm over
the side of the dugout. But before he could free his catch, a monster
rose out of the depths. The tiger shark, attracted by blood from the
bleeding fish, bit sharply into the fisherman's upper arm and began
its death roll. Failing to sever the upper arm at mid shaft, it tore
the flesh from his arm as its razor sharp teeth descended toward the
elbow. At the elbow the strength of its bite and the violent twisting
of its body ripped the lower arm cleanly away. Blood gushed from the
amputated extremity.

The canoe may have
capsized, or the fisherman may have simply collapsed on its floor. His
blood mixing with that of their catch. Without modern medical assistance,
his life drained away. His partner succeeded in righting and guiding
the canoe back to shore. With the assistance of other men who came racing
from the village to see what had happened, they carried him home. His
body was buried in the middle of the village, under the plaza. The cleared
space at the center of the community where people gathered in communal
events. There was great sadness at the loss of this adult man, the head
of a family and able provider of fish for his village. His burial placed
him among the ancestors. Although he was gone from this world, he lived
on in the world of the dead where he could forever be called upon to
help when assistance from the otherworld was needed.

Although this recreation of
an event that took place more than 1,000 years ago is somewhat fanciful and
perhaps even melodramatic, it fits what we know of life in pre-Columbian Puerto
Rico.

In the late 1980s, Dr. Peter
E. Siegel, with support from the Centro de Investigaciones Indigenas de Puerto
Rico, directed archaeological excavations at the pre-Columbian site known
as Maisabel on the north coast of Puerto Rico near the modern town of Vega
Baja. The research was the basis for his Ph.D. dissertation, Ideology,
Power, and Social Complexity in Prehistoric Puerto Rico. Dr. Siegel found
that the site had been occupied from around 120 B.C. until A.D. 1000, making
it one of the earliest and longest-lived villages in the West Indies. The
site is composed of 6 middens, deposits of pottery, food remains, and other
artifacts, arranged in a roughly circular shape. The middens surround a plaza
in which very few artifacts were found. However, during the excavations Siegel
discovered that the plaza was a large cemetery. In his words, Dr. Siegel describes
this as the axis mundi, the central axis of the world in the eyes of
the people who created it. The axis mundi served to connect the various
layers of the cosmos. The cemetery held the bones of the ancestors, who were
venerated by their living descendants.

Burial number 17, a 29 year old male who was fatally attacked by
a tiger shark more than 1,000 years ago.

Dr. Siegel enlisted the assistance of Linda Budinoff, a graduate
student studying human remains, for the analysis of the skeletons that he excavated.
Her conclusions were presented
at the 12th International Congress of the International Association
for Caribbean Archaeology in Cayenne, French Guiana, and were published in
the Proceedings of the Congress. Burial number 17 turned out to be of special
interest. According to her analysis, burial 17 was a 29 year old male. He
was buried in a flexed (fetal) position, with prehistoric pottery, chert flakes,
unmodified raw local stone,
shell, chert hammerstone, calcite, ochre, and a coral abrader.
The skeleton is complete with the exception of the lower right arm and hand.
There are a series of cut marks on the upper right arm (humerus), which Budinoff
says could indicate he "may have been tortured and executed" (p. 118).
One radiocarbon date places the time of death sometime between cal AD 789
and 1033. This skeleton, along with another that had a stingray spine lodged
between its ribs, were used as evidence for armed conflict at the time.

The characteristics of the
multiple cut marks led me to question whether they were actually caused by
a weapon. For instance, the marks occur on opposite sides of the bone with
all of the cuts in a downward (distal) direction. One can easily envision
someone being struck in such a way on the outer part of their arm, but it
is difficult to imagine how similar cuts were made on the inner arm near the
body. If the arm was raised when the blows were struck, then the cuts would
occur in an upward direction toward the proximal end of the humerus. In other
words, the cuts on the inside and outside of the arm would occur in opposite
directions. Since burial 17 had multiple cuts on the inside and outside of
the humerus in the same direction, I sought expert counsel.

Budinoff provided several excellent
photographs of the injury (reproduced here courtesy of Dr. Peter Siegel and
the Centro de Investigaciones Indigenas de Puerto Rico). These photos were
examined by the late UF forensic anthropologist Dr. William Maples, author
of Dead Men Do Tell Tales (co-author Michael Browning, Doubleday, 1994).
Maples was not told where the bone came from, nor any other information about
its context (though he knew that I worked in the West Indies). His first suggestion
was that a machete caused the cuts. I explained that there were no metal tools
available at the time the wound was made. Next he suggested obsidian, but
again there are no obsidian tools from this area. He stated that a chert (flint)
tool might be possible, but that it was difficult to sharpen stone tools to
the point at which they
could produce such sharp cuts. Moreover, he noted that there were multiple
cuts in close proximity that were all in the same direction. These were not
the wounds a living individual would get, for example, in an axe or machete
fight. If this individual was fending off attack then the multiple cuts would
have been widely spaced on the humerus and lower arm. Moreover, defensive
wounds are far more common on the forearm
(we naturally raise our arm in front of us to fend off attack) then on the
upper arm. If the cut marks were caused by human agency, they would have had
to occur after the individual was incapacitated. The key, however, was the
tiny striations associated with the cuts. These are not typical of human tools.
When asked whether a shark could have produced such cut marks he exclaimed
"absolutely." He directed me to George Burgess, keeper of the International
Shark Attack File, which he maintains in conjunction with the American Elasmobranch
Society.

Burgess is the Collection Manager for Ichthyology at the Florida Museum of Natural
History. As Keeper of the shark attack
file he has reviewed more than 3,000 cases (http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/fish/Sharks/Sharks.htm).
After examining the photographs Burgess concluded that the markings were typical
of bone damage inflicted by a shark. Moreover, he felt that the striations associated
with the cuts made it likely that the culprit was a tiger shark (Galeocerdo
cuvier). He reported that the tiger shark will bite its victim and if it
is not able to sever the appendage on its first bite it will tear the flesh
and bite again all the while twisting its body to use its weight and strength
as leverage. Often what will happen is that the appendage will be severed at
a joint. This is exactly what we see with burial 17. Apparently the shark was
not able to bite through the humerus on its first try. It must have released
its bite, bit again, and tore the arm off at the elbow.

For us, life is composed of
a series of individual events, yet the most an archaeologist usually can hope
to achieve is generalizations about what happened in the past. In certain
rare instances, such as this man from Maisabel, we see life and death frozen
in an instant. Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Dr. Peter
Siegel for allowing me to use the material from his excavations at Maisabel.
The above interpretations are my own and not those of Dr. Siegel. The photographs
of the bones were taken by Linda Budinoff. Her excellent analysis of the skeletal
remains is much appreciated. The radiocarbon date was obtained by Dr. Anne
V. Stokes in the course of her Ph.D. research into prehistoric diet in the
West Indies.

References

Budinoff, Linda C. (1991). An
Osteological Analysis of the Human Burials Recovered from Maisabel: An Early
Ceramic Site on the North Coast of Puerto Rico. In Proceedings of the 12th
Congress of the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology, L. S.
Robinson (ed.), A.I.A.C., Martinique, pp. 117-134.

Siegel, Peter E. (1992). Ideology,
Power, and Social Complexity in Prehistoric Puerto Rico. Doctoral dissertation,
State University of New York, Binghamton.

Stokes, Anne V. (1998). A Biogeographic
Survey of Prehistoric Human Diet in the West Indies Using Stable Isotope Analysis.
Doctoral dissertation, University of Florida, Gainesville.